Patrick Francis Healy


Patrick Francis Healy was a Jesuit priest, educator, and the 29th President of Georgetown University, known for expanding the school following the American Civil War. Healy Hall was constructed during Healy's tenure and is named after him. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in the late 20th century.
Although Healy identified as and was accepted as Irish-American during his lifetime, in the 1950s and 1960s his mixed-race ancestry became more widely known and acknowledged. He was recognized as the first U.S. citizen of African descent to earn a PhD, to be admitted to the Jesuit order, and to be president of any predominantly white college in the United States.

Early life

Patrick Francis Healy was born on February 27, 1834, in a log cabin in Macon, Georgia. Patrick's father, Michal Morris Healy, had emigrated from Ireland to the United States, through Canada, in 1818. On land that he won in the Georgia Land Lotteries, he established a cotton plantation on the banks of the Ocmulgee River, and at the time of his death owned, 50 slaves. One of those was Patrick's mother, Mary Eliza Smith, who Michael Healy purchased. Eliza was one-eighth black, known as an octoroon, making her children one-sixteenth black. One of her parents had fled Haiti for the United States in the 1790s, during the Haitian Revolution.
As interracial marriage was prohibited by Georgia's anti-miscegenation law, Michael formed a common-law marriage with the 16-year-old Eliza in 1829. While the Catholic Church did recognize interracial marriages, there were no priests in Macon County at that time to officiate. Their marriage was unusual among interracial marriages in the South at the time in that neither had ever married anyone else, and after marriage, they lived with each other faithfully for the rest of their lives until both of their deaths in 1850.
Patrick was the third of ten siblings, eight of whole would survive into adulthood. His three sisters would go on to become nuns, while two of his brothers would also become Catholic priests; one of them, James Augustine Healy, would become the Bishop of Portland, and the first black Catholic bishop in the United States. Patrick and all of his siblings were born as slaves, as by the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, they inherited the legal status of their mother. Michael Healy was prevented by Georgia law from manumitting his wife or children, which was allowed only in exceptional circumstances, by an act of the Georgia General Assembly.

Education

As slaves under the law, the Healy children were prohibited from attending school in Georgia. Wishing to remove his children from their conditions of slavery in Georgia, Michael Healy sent all of his children to be educated in the North. At the time of his death in August 1850, he also intended to join them in the north. Healy was at first unable to find a school in the north that would accept his children, resulting from anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry. However, he eventually found a Quaker school in Flushing, New York, called the Flushing Quaker Academy, that allowed the three oldest sons to enroll.
Like three of his brothers, Patrick Healy continued his education at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He graduated in 1850, at the age of 16, and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts by Georgetown University, as Holy Cross had not yet been chartered and conferred degrees under Georgetown's charter. After graduating, Healy entered the Society of Jesus on September 17, 1850, at the novitiate in Frederick, Maryland. While he worried that his mixed race would present an obstacle to his entrance into the Jesuit order, this proved less of a concern than the fact because Healy's parents were never legally married in the eyes of the church, he was born out of wedlock. While under canon law, Healy required a dispensation to join the order, none was ever sought and he was admitted without issue. With his admission to the Society of Jesus, he became the first black American Jesuit.
After two years of study, Healy professed his first vows, and was sent to teach at Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia. The following year, he was transferred to Holy Cross. While teaching there, he found that some students who knew his brothers learned of his racial background and made disparaging comments about him in secret. In 1858, Healy went to Georgetown University, where he taught philosophy and theology.
The Jesuit superiors at Georgetown were impressed by his skill in philosophy, and decided to send him to Europe, where he continued his study of philosophy and theology. He first went to Rome, but during the winter, his health declined, and he was sent to Belgium to continue his studies at the Catholic University of Louvain. While there, he was ordained a priest on September 3, 1864. He also became fluent in Latin, French, Italian, and German. On July 26, 1865, he received a Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy, making him the first black American ever to earn a Ph.D.

Racial identity

Throughout his life, Healy's race was the subject of varying degrees of speculation. The Healy brothers considered themselves white, rather than black. Of them all, Patrick Healy most readily passed as white. Indeed, his passport described his complexion as "light," suggesting he passed as a light-skinned white man, rather than a light-skinned black man. Though he himself identified as white, knowledge of his mixed race background would not be a secret while he served as president of Georgetown University. His fellow Jesuits knew of his mixed race, but it is unlikely that this was widely known outside of Jesuit circles.
Despite his appearance and self-identity, speculation as to his race remained with him. Orestes Brownson, who knew the Healy family personally, alluded to the Healy brothers who became priests as belonging to the category of "men with large admixture of negro blood, born of slave mothers," while decrying racism in the United States in an 1862 article. Likewise, while in school, Patrick Healy faced rumors among classmates that his white but slightly dark complexion was due to the presence of some "Spanish blood." Of the three priests, only one, Alexander Sherwood Healy, appeared as black.

Georgetown University

In 1866, Healy returned to Maryland, and was appointed the chair of philosophy at Georgetown University. After two years, he became the prefect of schools. The following year, he professed his final vows. On May 23, 1873, he also became the vice rector of the university. As the president, John Early's, health began to fail, Healy increased assumed the duties of the presidency. He initiated a reorganization of classes, established an alumni society, and created three graduation medals: the Merrick Debating Medal, the Morris Historical Medal, and the Tower Scientific Medal. He also discontinued the monastic practice of have one student read aloud in the refectory during meals. He also expressed his desire that a grand new building be constructed to connect Old North and the Maguire Building.
As early as 1869, there was talk of naming Healy to succeeded Early's predecessor, Bernard A. Maguire. The provincial superior, Joseph Keller, had described Healy as the most qualified candidate, but the superiors in Rome, decided on Early due to Healy's race. When Early's health began to deteriorate, Keller proposed to the superiors in Rome that John Bapst succeed him, while Healy would replace Bapst as the president of Boston College, believing that his race would be less of an issue at the New England school. Rome rejected this arrangement, deciding that Bapst should remain in Boston.

Presidency

On May 23, 1873, Early died suddenly, and Keller made Healy the acting rector. The following day, the board of directors took the further step of electing him the acting president of Georgetown University. However, his appointment as rector by the Jesuit Superior General, which ordinarily was done around the same time as the selection of a new president, did not come until a year later. The delay was the result of concern in Rome over Healy's mixed race background. On July 31, 1874, he was officially inaugurated as president and rector of the university. As such, he became the first black president of a predominantly white university in the United States. In a very unusual arrangement, while president, he continued to hold the role of prefect, until 1879.
In the year following his inauguration as president, Healy articulated his vision of transforming Georgetown into a true "university" to the Superior General, Peter Jan Beckx. While Georgetown already fit the contemporary American definition of a university—a collection of degree-granting schools under one administration—Healy sought to remake Georgetown in the newly emerging notion of a university—an institution where a person could learn in a wide array of increasingly specialized academic fields. In this way, Georgetown could become what the nation's bishops, gathered in 1866 at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, had envisioned: a great Catholic university in the United States that engaged in scholarship in every religious and secular subject.
Patrick Healy's influence on Georgetown was so far-reaching that he is often referred to as the school's "second founder," following Archbishop John Carroll.
He modernized the curriculum by requiring courses in the sciences, particularly chemistry and physics. He expanded and upgraded the schools of law and medicine. He became one of the most renowned Jesuit priests of his time in that role. The most visible result of Healy's presidency was the construction of the university's flagship building designed by Paul J. Pelz, begun in 1877 and first used in 1881. The building was named in his honor as Healy Hall.

Later years

Healy left the College in 1882; he traveled extensively through the United States and Europe, often in the company of his brother James, a bishop in Maine. In 1908 he returned to the campus infirmary, where he died. He was buried on the grounds of the university in the Jesuit cemetery.
According to James O'Toole, who wrote about all the Healy family, it was not until the 1960s that the Healys' mixed-race ancestry was widely known.

Honors